The Mohawk phrase for depression, Wake' nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on, can be roughly translated to 'a mind spread out on the ground.' Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of persona, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott's writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes connections between the past and present, the personal and political.